Antithesis: The Defining Feature of Pliny’s Prose (A Pliny Appreciation Guide, Part 2)
Antithesis, the Defining Feature of Pliny's Prose
Of all the stylistic devices found in Pliny’s letters, none are quite as prominent as antithesis, which Whitton describes as a “defining feature” that is “at the core of Pliny’s prose style.”[1] Antithesis is when a writer sets two (or more) ideas in opposition to each other, creating a juxtaposition which intensifies each of the ideas. The quote below is not only a good example of antithesis, but also illustrates the technique on a metaphorical level:
Just as the darkness of night makes the fires seem even brighter, antithesis takes two elements and augments the qualities of each one through juxtaposition with the other.
While this technique has always been a feature of Latin literature, authors grew more and more partial to it in the generations after Augustus. Philologists of the 19th and early 20th century, however, viewed antithesis as “a brilliant and dangerous figure,” effective in moderation, but showing “artifice and affectation” when overused.[2] Therefore, authors who showed a fondness for antithesis, such as Seneca and Pliny, were for centuries characterized as inferior to their “Golden Age” counterparts. Pliny in particular was often criticized for his antithesis-heavy style: Westcott (1899) called his antitheses “somewhat excessive,”[3] while Mayor (1889) decried Pliny’s “extravagant love” for the figure.[4] Modern readers, however, have warmed to Pliny’s judicious and effective use of antithesis, recognizing the “grace and elegance” that it lends to his writing.[5]
In spite of all the efforts to periodize Latin literature by its features, antithesis is not that hard to find in “Golden Age” authors. Pliny would have found many illustrative examples in his idol Cicero:
Note that the antithetical word-pairs are similar in form; the old-fashioned philologists considered this an ideal feature of antithesis.[6] Cicero places comparative adjectives in opposition, sometimes with phonetic similarities (
Just like Cicero, Pliny chooses words that are very similar in form—not just an infinitive and a gerundive, but verbs of the same conjugation—which enables the two contrasting ideas to better play off each other.
Looking at Pliny’s antitheses, we also see inspiration from the world of poetry, especially from Martial. Epigrams and epistulae have a lot in common, after all.
et tua patricius culmina vīcus habet;
hinc viduae Cybelēs, illinc sacrāria Vestae,
inde novum, veterem prōspicis inde Iovem.
Dīc ubi conveniam, dīc quā tē parte requīram;
quisquis ubīque habitat, Maxime, nusquam habitat. (7.73)
Not only did Pliny have great respect for Martial (as his eulogy for him in letter 3.21 makes clear), his “pointed style” evokes Martial’s poetry, and in fact “some of his letters might be called ‘epigrams in prose.’”[7] This makes sense: epigrams, like letters, demand brevity, and both genres often rely on antithesis for their rhetorical punch. In the epigram above, we see antitheses in lines 1, 3, and 4, mixing chiasmus and parallel structure, and Martial concludes with a paradoxical antithesis in the form of a sententia (a maxim or proverb-like saying). These are all techniques of antithesis that Pliny would employ throughout his letters.
Most commonly, antithesis in Pliny is expressed using asyndeton, which forces the two clashing ideas together:
Elsewhere, he uses polysyndeton:
Or he might use subordination to join the two ideas together:
When it comes to word order, Pliny usually puts antithesis in a chiasmus:
But he sometimes uses parallel structure, with two elements (as in 6.16.3 above), or even three, as below:
When each part of the antithesis is three words or more, Pliny tends to avoid a strict A-B-C, A-B-C parallel structure.[8] Take this example:
Note how Pliny inverts the order of the verb and the genitive (
| Subject | Verb | Predicate |
Why avoid a literal parallel here? Perhaps Pliny felt that putting the words in the exact same order each time would sound tasteless and overwrought—the “artifice and affectation” of antithesis that philologists of the next millennium would lament. Whatever his reasons, Pliny often mitigates the effects of exact harmony with “intervening words or formal or syntactical variation,” leaning towards the inconcinnitās that his friend Tacitus was famous for.[9]
Here, Pliny breaks up the exact harmony by using a litotes in the second component of the antithesis:
And here is one where he inserts a word into the second element:
Note especially the balance of the above antithesis: by slipping the
If an elision occurs between the first two words (as is assumed to happen within a phrase, even in prose[11]), then each part of the antithesis is exactly ten syllables. Add this to the other literary techniques—polyptoton of
I’ll close with just one more example of an antithesis that abounds with other literary devices: anaphora (with
I could go on for a long time—there are so many examples in the AP selections alone—but I think that these should be more than sufficient to demonstrate this particular feature of Pliny’s style. Notes
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